Category Archives: Information Technology & Computers

Basic Income for “Unaffiliated” Scholars

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I wonder what I would have done with my life, if there had been a basic income (of, say, $2500 to $3000 Cdn. per month) available to me after I completed my Ph.D. I wouldn’t have had to deal with (roughly in chronological order) part-time adjunct/sessional teaching, part-time arts admin and choral singing jobs, three temporary full-time academic jobs each most of the way across the continent, applying for several hundred full-time academic jobs, several periods on welfare (averaging around $550 per month, including shelter!), bankruptcy, attempts to get into IT and LIS, leaving academia for a series of part-time and temporary customer-service type jobs not at a living wage, and getting approved for a consumer debt proposal.

The job I have now as a medical courier is full-time, with some benefits, and I was very lucky to be able to upgrade my casual/on-call role to that. However, it’s still on the low end of a living wage and way below the national average annual income of around $69,000 Cdn. It’s okay, though, because I have places to keep my stuff, a place to live, a person to share my life with, a dog, an extended family that helps me with my elderly Mom, and financial help from my Mom (via my aunt and uncle) to get a used car.

However, without being an exploited academic or an exploited worker and with having a basic income to live on, I could have become what I should have been. I would have continued as an “unaffiliated” musicologist: writing scholarly books and articles, presenting papers at academic conferences, developing music-related websites and web content, and performing and composing music–without ever stopping any of those things.

(Friday, July 24, 2026, 9:15 p.m.): Oh, well, back to work: the final four hours of my 40-hour work week.

See also: https://drbdurrellbowmanphd.bandcamp.com/album/the-tower

Ticketmaster/StubHub – The Ticket Reseller Conundrum

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When I joined the Ticketmaster queue at 12:00 noon today, 6566 “people” were ahead of me to buy tickets in the summer 2026 Rush: Fifty Something pre-sale. So, the pre-sale probably accounted for most of the venue’s seats, and what I encountered was just for the second day out of the four in Toronto. Theoretically, there were tickets for as low as $137.75.

I joined the waiting room within seconds of it opening at 11:30. At 12:05 (in the queue for 5 minutes), it indicated that $137.75 and $173.25 tickets were limited. Clearly, StubHub, TicketSmarter, etc. reseller bots beat me in the waiting list / queue and bought up all the cheap seats first, to sell them at higher prices.

After 12 minutes, there were still 2946 “people” ahead of me, and tickets were by then “very limited.” After a 20 minute wait in the queue, the cheapest seats available to me were $417 each. After another 3 minutes, the cheapest were $608.73 each. After another 2 minutes, the cheapest thing was a hotel/tickets package for two at $1478.91.

StubHub very quickly had new tickets available for the same show on the same day, and the lowest price I saw within an hour was $380 each. A few hours later, it was $431, and StubHub also seemed to know that the event was 88% sold out. Why would a reseller know that, unless it had scooped up basically all of the tickets and replaced Ticketmaster as the seller?

I will try for tickets up to $200 again on Friday, when Ticketmaster’s “general public” sales open. I fully expect things to happen much the same as today. However, I will do a more direct comparison of actual seat-price levels on Ticketmaster and on StubHub. My guess is that their resellers are more than doubling the prices.

The US, Canadian, UK, and other governments need to put an end to the obvious “insider trading,” “antitrust,” scalper-bot shenanigans going on at Live Nation / Ticketmaster / StubHub / TicketSmarter, etc. Even if it’s currently legal, it certainly is not ethical. Actual humans should be able to buy actual tickets at the actual prices.

Computers in Canada – US Limits

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I’ve now set up a new-to-me computer: a Dell “one litre” mini, but it was refurbished and updated by Canada Computers. That’s just my first step in limiting the amount of money I give to US companies.

Continue reading →

The Tower (concept album)

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I’m still very slowly working on my concept album The Tower (about the various problems with higher education), but I’ve moved beyond “concepts of a plan” to an actual plan. I know what all ten songs are (plus the “bonus track,” which is lyrically only tangentially related to the concept), what 95% of their words are, and what style they’re in. Some are based on much earlier songs and instrumental pieces of mine (but with new lyrics and/or added spoken words), and some are entirely new songs.

It’s going to be very “old school” (say, 1969 to 1984) experimental/electronic music and progressive rock influenced, keyboard-based, classic rock and pop-rock sounding. Parts of it have influences from Tangerine Dream, Supertramp and the Who, David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, Ultravox (probably, contingent on finding certain late-’70s/early-’80s synth and electronic drum sounds), Rush (I like switching into 7/4, etc.), and Laurie Anderson (I’ve figured out pitch shifting, but vocoding so far remains a mystery to me).

I’m using the free (!) Digital Audio Workstation / DAW called Cakewalk, and I use freely available soft synths and other sounds from a variety of sources. Just to give a sense of what this crazy, elaborate type of software is like, here are photos of the first two songs (“Spread Too Thin” and “The Ivory Tower’s Crumbling”), but still without vocals added.

Songwriting and Performing

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My songwriting and live performing have converged into using my semi-weighted controller keyboard (which was a gift from Vicky and others some years ago), my DAW (digital audio workstation) software, and numerous virtual instruments and effects. Today, I figured out how to make live song files that map different instruments as splits and layers across 88 keys. There are easier ways to do it, but this way I didn’t have to purchase a digital piano or VST host software. In fact, I didn’t spend anything; even my DAW (Cakewalk by BandLab) was free!

ChatGPT

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https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt

ChatGPT

There’s a meme going around about artifical intelligence (AI) software actually being plagiarism software, but that’s not really what’s going on.

I’ve used ChatGPT to see what it would do. For topics where there’s a lot of info out there, it’s maybe 80% on point, but genericizes the info, has no particular (or at least no strong) “thesis,” shows no evidence of research, provides no references (and can’t if you ask it to), and is poorly written. So, all of that is similar to a high school or early undergrad essay that would probably get a C or D.

If it directly took sentences from somewhere without citing them, that would be plagiarism/fail/F, but I don’t find that’s usually what it does. It’s more insidious than that.

On more obscure topics (even when the facts are out there in at least a few places), it makes up almost everything and is only maybe 20% accurate, in addition to many of the above problems. That’s not plagiarism, but it’s a definite fail/F.

The program is actually really good at coming up with poems and lyrics in the style of certain writers, but that is also not plagiarism.

Help Me Get Better LinkedIn!

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LinkedIn seems to be mainly useful for people who have had fairly straightforward job experiences within limited industries. It also helps if one has easily highlighted skills, with useful endorsements and recent recommendations by people who know what you’re trying to do.
Numerically to date, my top endorsements are: Music, Singing, Writing, and WordPress, followed by other IT/Computer things (but Software Development?!) and Music things (but Music Theory?!). There’s almost nothing else about my academic work in musicology (just Editing) and absolutely nothing about my work in Library & Information Science.
I’ve added some categories, deleted others, and am trying to get some more recent, relevant people to help me update my skills endorsements and recommendations. I find that very few academics and librarians actually use LinkedIn, but please help me out if you are able to. Thanks!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/durrellbowman/

 

“Deep Digital” Writing & Reading

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf?CMP=fb_gu

This article begs the question as to what “skim writing” might entail. Academic research and writing seem like an awful lot of trouble, given that it takes a long time to produce with almost no-one encountering it after all that. Also, Malcolm Gladwell and others are just going to reorganize selected parts of it, anyhow. Why not skip the middle man? Why shouldn’t we try to get to “deep digital” parallels to writing and reading?

Simpsons book bio

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Here’s my bio for a forthcoming book about The Simpsons (McFarland, 2018, edit: actually 2019), in which I have a chapter called “Be Sharp: The Simpsons & Music.” [I also have a semi-related journal article coming out in MUSICultures in 2020.]

Durrell Bowman has a Ph.D. in Musicology (UCLA, 2003), a Certificate in Computer Applications Development (2010), and a Master of Library and Information Science (2018). For about a decade, he developed and taught music history courses as an adjunct or visiting instructor at seven institutions all across North America. He has also worked as a semi-professional choral singer, built websites, and presented numerous conference papers, including several on music in The Simpsons. In addition, he has written books, book chapters, journal articles, media and book reviews, reference entries, and program notes. His books are: Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and Rush and Philosophy: Heart and Mind United (co-editor and three chapters, Open Court Publishing, 2011). He hails from what Homer refers to as “America Junior” and agrees with Marge that “grad students just made a terrible life choice.”

Delivery Driver, Occasional Musician, and Former Academic (Ph.D. in Musicology)

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